The Federal Reserve confirmed that Chairwoman Janet Yellen will speak at next week’s Jackson Hole forum for global central bankers. The WSJ has previously reported she is attending, but the Fed hadn’t until now confirmed she will speak.

Ben Bernanke’s addresses at Jackson Hole the past few years had become an unintended staging ground for policy twists, preceding, as they did, launches of the Fed’s last three bond purchase programs. Because the Fed has already telegraphed the end of bond purchases, Jackson Hole serves a different purpose for Ms. Yellen. The subject of her talk, and the broader conference, is labor markets, a subject dear to the Yale PhD’s heart. Her remarks begin Friday at 10 am EDT.

Ms. Yellen can celebrate the fact that labor markets have improved more quickly than Fed officials expected earlier this year. And there are puzzles to solve. Why is the job market improving so steadily when output growth is slow and erratic? How low can the unemployment rate go before officials need to worry about wage pressure and inflation? Can the long-term unemployed be drawn back into the workforce in a more vibrant economy? Is workforce productivity waning?

Fed officials have theories, but not answers to those questions. It is one reason their interest rate guidance has shifted of late from assurances of low rates to a new emphasis on the uncertainty about the policy path ahead.

-By Jon Hilsenrath

MORNING MINUTES: KEY DEVELOPMENTS AROUND THE WORLD

Bullard Says Fed Getting “Pretty Close” to Policy Goals. Falling unemployment and rising inflation are bringing the Federal Reserve closer to its goals more rapidly than policy makers had foreseen, and may justify raising interest rates as early as the end of the first quarter of 2015, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said Thursday. “Basically we’re way ahead of schedule for labor market improvement,” Mr. Bullard told the Journal in an interview.

U.S. Household Debt Sinks, New Mortgage Loans at 14-Year Low. Borrowing by U.S. households fell this spring after three straight quarters of increases, driven by a 14-year low in new mortgage loans. Total outstanding household debt — including mortgages, home-equity loans, credit cards, auto loans and student loans — sank $18 billion between April and June to $11.63 trillion, new figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed Thursday.

ECB Likely Faces Added Pressure Over Stalled Economy. Data showing gross domestic product in the euro zone was flat in the second quarter compared with the first likely puts added pressure on the European Central Bank to do more to spur growth and boost inflation. In June, the ECB cut its key interest rates and introduced a new program of cheap loans to banks that are intended to be passed on to businesses. But some economists say the central bank should go further and engage in large-scale purchases of public and private debt to reduce borrowing costs and add to the money supply.

Asian Eyes on Jackson Hole. Central bankers meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyo., next week are set to discuss labor market dynamics, and that’s a topic Asian policy makers are closely monitoring. How the U.S. Federal Reserve interprets U.S. labor data is crucial for when it will decide to start guiding short-term interest rates higher. And that could have a big impact on Asian economies whose asset markets have been buoyed this year by cheap global money.

U.K. Wages May Be About to Take Off. The Bank of England has signaled that as long as real wage growth remains low, it will not advance its plans to raise interest rates in early 2015. But salaries might pick up soon.

Housing-Obsessed U.K. Can’t Measure Housing Costs. A little under a year ago, Britain’s Office for National Statistics unveiled a new measure of U.S. inflation that incorporated housing costs, which aren’t included in the main yardstick of consumer-price inflation. On Thursday, the new index — known by the acronym CPIH – was stripped it of its designation as an official statistic because it may be faulty.

Malaysian Economy Speeds Up. Malaysia’s economy accelerated in the second quarter, raising the possibility of an increase in interest rates. Bank Negara Malaysia Gov. Zeti Akhtar Aziz told a news conference after the data release that full-year growth will likely exceed earlier projections of between 4.5% and 5.5% in 2014. The central bank will issue a revised forecast after the government’s budget presentation in October, she said.

GRAPHIC CONTENT

One of the biggest changes in the U.S. labor market over the past two decades has been the increasing number of people working over the age of 55. From the end of World War II until the early 1990s, a smaller and smaller share remained in the labor force but since the 1990s that trend reversed. In 1993, only 29% of people that age were in the labor force. The vast majority were retired. But participation has been rising and by 2012 more than 41% of people in that age group were still in the labor force, the highest since the early 1960s. Clearly, something has changed about people’s attitudes toward retirement. A survey from the Federal Reserve last week provided some clues. Around 21% of people said their plan for retirement is simply “to work as long as possible” and the number of people giving this response increases by age.

FORWARD GUIDANCE

-Minneapolis Fed’s Kocherlakota speaks on community banking and the economy in Brainerd, Minn. at 10:45 a.m. EDT

RESEARCH

Looking Under the Hood of the Subprime Auto Lending Market. The share of U.S. auto loans originated by borrowers with credit scores below 620 is up slightly since 2010. But “the small increase in the share masks the fact that the subprime auto lending market has grown substantially over the last several years,” New York Fed economists write on the bank’s Liberty Street Economics blog.

COMMENTARY

The virtual currency bitcoin has attracted public attention, but “bitcoins are not widely accepted as a method of payment at most retailers, so the transaction volume associated with bitcoin is only a fraction of that of other forms of payment,” the Cleveland Fed’s Joseph G. Haubrich and Ashley Orr write in an article posted on the bank’s website. Their conclusion: “It’s perhaps too early to assess the future of bitcoin, but in terms of number of transactions, total value, and even price stability, it is not currently a major competitor of the US dollar.”

ECB President Mario Draghi “is under fire to do more to resuscitate growth. He, in turn, argues that monetary policy can only achieve so much, with government reform required to do the heavy lifting,” Mark Gilbert writes in a Bloomberg View column. “He’s right; but the worsening state of the euro-region economy probably means the political appetite for reform, which was never great, is receding.”

BASIS POINTS

-Farmland values dipped slightly or remained largely unchanged in the second quarter across much of the U.S. Midwest, reflecting a continued cooling in the market following a multiyear rise in prices, according to Fed reports Thursday.

-India’s wholesale inflation eased to the lowest level in five months in July, but the relief could be temporary as weak seasonal rainfall drives up food prices.

The U.K. economy expanded at a slightly faster annual rate in the second quarter than initially thought, according to official data Friday, boosted by a better performance from the construction sector – Dow Jones Newswires.

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